2014-08-05

It is located in Styria, Austria, and is called the
Green Lake.
While its depth is about 1-2 meters during the winter, it rises up to about 12 meters in the summer.
This results in trees, benches, and even a bridge going underwater. I highly recommend that you watch this video. Very breath-taking.

I think I should learn some diving.

2014-08-07

This detailed research
also suggests that there is apparently no age-related difference in ability
to recall intense emotional episodes. However, there appeared to be a decline in emotional
expressivity with age, especially of negative emotions.

A more recent paper
narrows down emotion control to the prefrontal lobe. It also suggests that similar mechanisms
are at work during emotion control and when one is learning to
associate new emotional responses with stimuli.

2014-08-08

Many gas giants have a solid core made of rock, ice or whatnot.

This is probably quite obvious, but I was completely ignorant of the structure of Gas Giants
before. This picture is a good visualization of it.
Still, Jupiter and Saturn only have 3-13 percent of the mass in heavy elements.
However, some hot gas giants may have their core dissolved
within the gas.

Another fun thing about Gas Giants is their wild weather.
For instance, in the upper layers of the atmosphere near the equator of Saturn,
winds can reach the speed of up to 1,800 km/h.
Compare that to the strongest hurricanes being about 396 km/h on Earth.

2014-08-10

Roughly 550 million years ago, there was a “sudden” orders-of-magnitude increase in the
variety of life

By sudden, I mean that over the course of about 40 million years,
most major animal phyla appeared. That is indeed sudden and rapid, compared to the fact that
for over 3 billion years, only simple unicellular organisms (and occasional colonies)
existed